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This paper discusses the discourses surrounding an ambitious high-school transformation project in a large Canadian city that sought to reimagine education for 21st century learning. It was grounded in a broad review of the latest educational research. While an initial eight schools signed on, by the end of the second year all had left the project. Drawing upon Gee's ([2005]. "An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method." New York, NY: Routledge; [2014]. "How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit." New York, NY: Routledge) tools for analyzing 'Knowledge Building' discourses, we explore how the project's communications produced tensions and contradictions, which reflect similar ones within the global research discourses on educational change. Key elements include strong branding, inconsistent messaging over objectives and ownership, centralized control and external sources of authority, a 'start fresh' ethos, and unfamiliar educational values from systems and design thinking. Ultimately, neoliberal assumptions about the means and ends of schooling embedded in the 21st century change discourses undermined the collaborative and teacher driven stated aims of the project.

In Peru, Indigenous students from rural communities must often migrate to urban areas to access higher education. Navigating to and through urban higher education is a complex task where Peru's oppressive colonial legacies intertwine with students' community values, resources, and strengths. How can we more deeply understand the interconnecting systems that oppress and support rural Indigenous students, and how can we mobilize these understandings to reimagine higher education? In this paper, we use photo-cued interviewing and ecological systems theory to: (1) make sense of rural Indigenous students' experiences as they navigate to and through higher education in urban areas; and (2) uncover levers for systemic change to improve higher education policy and practice. In doing so, we expand beyond a two worlds perspective of Indigenous educational experiences to offer a more holistic view on coloniality and Indigenous resilience in higher education.

In this article we discuss a collaborative research project meant to ground community members' voices in curriculum design. We argue that performing collaborative research with students and parents can better inform curriculum design decisions, particularly for communities whose identities, knowledge(s), and ways of being have been historically marginalized. Building from the culturally responsive curriculum literature, we have developed a culturally grounded curriculum development approach. We illustrate the approach through discussing a case of its development and implementation with an educational nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides access to secondary school for Quechua (Indigenous) young women in Peru. This article reflexively reports the process of the NGO's collaborative inquiry project to cocreate meaningful educational opportunities with the students and parents. We then discuss dilemmas of interpretation that arose when incorporating community voices into curricular decisions, and how the collaborative curriculum approach can apply to formal and nonformal learning spaces in other contexts.

This article discusses the promises and complexities of culturally responsive leadership in schools. The study takes place in a rural secondary school in the Peruvian Andes using a participant voice methodology with 146 students and 50 parents. The goal of the study was to ascertain students' and parents' learning goals and aspirations to create responsive educational opportunities. Three major themes emerged from the study, each of which had implications for different theoretical orientations regarding education development. Findings suggest that culturally responsive leadership requires participant-voice practices, and that careful, multi-theory interpretation is necessary to understand participants in school contexts.

In this article, I discuss a pervasive ethical issue when undertaking action research (AR) projects with communities that have been historically marginalized: how outsiders' learned, normative Western thinking makes building equitable relationships difficult. I then offer strategies for researchers coming from privileged, outsider positionalities to develop their reflective capacities in order to decolonize their thinking. The strategies are based on ten years of reflexive AR work with Quechua community members in rural Peru. The strategies offer guidance on how individuals might begin to transform their internal frameworks when thinking about "the other," in order to be able to build equitable relationships during action research projects.

As national borders dissipate and technology allows different cultures and nationalities to communicate on a regular basis, more individuals are self-identifying as a global citizen. Using Social Network Analysis and multi-level modelling, this study explores factors associated with global citizen affinity and finds that education plays an important, perhaps the most important, role in individual's affinity towards this self-identification. Results clearly indicate that more education, not national economic or social integration, is more closely associated with an individual's positive identity as a global citizen. Additionally, the magnitude of the education effect is greater in more socially integrated societies.

This paper discusses the discourses surrounding an ambitious high-school transformation project in a large Canadian city that sought to reimagine education for 21st century learning. It was grounded in a broad review of the latest educational research. While an initial eight schools signed on, by the end of the second year all had left the project. Drawing upon Gee's ([2005]. An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York, NY: Routledge; [2014]. How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge) tools for analyzing 'Knowledge Building' discourses, we explore how the project's communications produced tensions and contradictions, which reflect similar ones within the global research discourses on educational change. Key elements include strong branding, inconsistent messaging over objectives and ownership, centralized control and external sources of authority, a 'start fresh' ethos, and unfamiliar educational values from systems and design thinking. Ultimately, neoliberal assumptions about the means and ends of schooling embedded in the 21st century change discourses undermined the collaborative and teacher driven stated aims of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Working towards social justice in education requires students' voices to be heard and understood (Mansfield, 2014). This is especially the case for students from marginalized populations. Prior research has shown the value and importance of students' voices for school retention, academic success, school inclusivity, and student buy-in (Brion-Meisels, 2014; Mitra, 2007, 2009). However, more research is needed on how adults understand and interpret students' voices and implement their understandings in school practice and policy. Purpose/Objective: This paper uncovers the danger of misinterpreting students' voices due to assumptions about concepts such as success and social justice. I explore this issue by interpreting first-generation Quechua (indigenous) students' voices about success in the Peruvian Andes through four different paradigms concerned with social change, social reproduction, and social justice. The discussion places into dialogue feminist theory, critical theory, postcolonial theory, and development theory in order to highlight the implications of each interpretive framework for responsive education policy. I show how interpretations based on each theory offer divergent school policy options--the danger of a single theory for interpreting student voice. Participants: The coresearchers for this paper are 14 young women from Quechua communities who are the first in their families to attend secondary school. Working with them are a woman from a Quechua community, a woman from Central Europe, and a man from the United States. Research Design: A collaborative ethnographic case study (Lassiter, 2005) utilizing student voice methods (Mitra, 2009). The students developed the theme and topic for research during a student-led seminar. Based on the students' questions, the adults helped facilitate the creation of an interview protocol with the students. The group answered the questions on the protocol and used the protocol to interview the students' parents. We held three total focus group discussions to develop the protocol, discuss findings, and interrogate ideas of success. Conclusions/Recommendations: The results highlight the vastly different interpretations and policy implications of students' voices based on each theory--highlighting how social justice is a complex concept that requires discussion across theoretical orientations. The findings also show points of overall congruence, and cross-theory trends. Recommendations are for educational leaders and researchers (teachers, parents, administrators) to reflect and think about empirical information from multiple theoretical frameworks in order to become more aware of the influence of one's own assumptions in educational decision-making.

In Peru, Indigenous students from rural communities must often migrate to urban areas to access higher education. Navigating to and through urban higher education is a complex task where Peru's oppressive colonial legacies intertwine with students' community values, resources, and strengths. How can we more deeply understand the interconnecting systems that oppress and support rural Indigenous students, and how can we mobilize these understandings to reimagine higher education? In this paper, we use photo-cued interviewing and ecological systems theory to 1) make sense of rural Indigenous students' experiences as they navigate to and through higher education in urban areas and 2) uncover levers for systemic change to improve higher education policy and practice. In doing so, we expand beyond a two worlds perspective of Indigenous educational experiences to offer a more holistic view on coloniality and Indigenous resilience in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and discusses Accidental Ethnography (AccE), a methodology for practitioners to examine past experiences and contribute their findings to scholarly discourse. Accidental ethnography is the systematic analysis of prior fieldwork. It utilizes extant data ''accidentally'' gathered (i.e. the data were not collected as part of a predesigned study) to provide insight into a phenomenon, culture, or way of life. The accidental ethnography method--a nascent method in research literature--was developed to provide a means of in-depth exploration of past practitioner learning experiences beyond personal reflection. This article organizes, advances, and systematizes an accidental ethnography method for practitioner-researchers. We propose here a method that encompasses broader intentionality on the part of the researcher and a potentially unorthodox chronology of steps in the ethnographic research process. For practitioners in education, where much is learned through action and reflection, accidental ethnography offers a methodological approach for rigorous reflective research by front-line practitioners who have traditionally had difficulty finding time to make rigorous contributions to the discipline. This article introduces the methodological approach, elaborates the accidental ethnography research process, situates the method within action research methodology, and provides an example of an accidental ethnography project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the promises and complexities of culturally responsive leadership in schools. The study takes place in a rural secondary school in the Peruvian Andes using a participant voice methodology with 146 students and 50 parents. The goal of the study was to ascertain students' and parents' learning goals and aspirations to create responsive educational opportunities. Three major themes emerged from the study, each of which had implications for different theoretical orientations regarding education development. Findings suggest that culturally responsive leadership requires participant-voice practices, and that careful, multi-theory interpretation is necessary to understand participants in school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As national borders dissipate and technology allows different cultures and nationalities to communicate on a regular basis, more individuals are self-identifying as a global citizen. Using Social Network Analysis and multi-level modelling, this study explores factors associated with global citizen affinity and finds that education plays an important, perhaps the most important, role in individual’s affinity towards this self-identification. Results clearly indicate that more education, not national economic or social integration, is more closely associated with an individual’s positive identity as a global citizen. Additionally, the magnitude of the education effect is greater in more socially integrated societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]